APPSAWG M. Kucherawy
Internet-Draft G. Shapiro
Intended status: Informational N. Freed
Expires: May 26, 2014 November 22, 2013
Advice for Safe Handling of Malformed Messagesdraft-ietf-appsawg-malformed-mail-11
Abstract
Although Internet mail formats have been precisely defined since the
1970s, authoring and handling software often show only mild
conformance to the specifications. The malformed messages that
result are non-standard. Nonetheless, decades of experience has
shown that handling with some tolerance the malformations that result
is often an acceptable approach, and is better than rejecting the
messages outright as nonconformant. This document includes a
collection of the best advice available regarding a variety of common
malformed mail situations, to be used as implementation guidance.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on May 26, 2014.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 1]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 20131. Introduction1.1. The Purpose Of This Work
The history of email standards, going back to [RFC733] and beyond,
contains a fairly rigid evolution of specifications However,
implementations within that culture have also long had an
undercurrent known formally as the robustness principle, also known
informally as Postel's Law: "Be liberal in what you accept, and
conservative in what you send." [RFC1122]
Jon Postel's directive is often misinterpreted to mean that any
deviance from a specification is acceptable. Rather, it was intended
only to account for legitimate variations in interpretation within
specifications, as well as basic transit errors, like bit errors.
Taken to its unintended extreme, excessive tolerance would imply that
there are no limits to the liberties that a sender might take, while
presuming a burden on a receiver to guess "correctly" at the meaning
of any such variation. These matters are further compounded by
receiver software -- the end users' mail readers -- which are also
sometimes flawed, leaving senders to craft messages (sometimes
bending the rules) to overcome those flaws.
In general, this served the email ecosystem well by allowing a few
errors in implementations without obstructing participation in the
game. The proverbial bar was set low. However, as we have evolved
into the current era, some of these lenient stances have begun to
expose opportunities that can be exploited by malefactors. Various
email-based applications rely on strong application of these
standards for simple security checks, while the very basic building
blocks of that infrastructure, intending to be robust, fail utterly
to assert those standards.
The distributed and non-interactive nature of email has often
prompted adjustments to receiving software, to handle these
variations, rather than trying to gain better conformance by senders,
since the receiving operator is primarily driven by complaints from
recipient users and has no authority over the sending side of the
system. Processing with such flexibility comes at some cost, since
mail software is faced with decisions about whether to permit non-
conforming messages to continue toward their destinations unaltered,
adjust them to conform (possibly at the cost of losing some of the
original message), or outright rejecting them.
This document includes a collection of the best advice available
regarding a variety of common malformed mail situations, to be used
as implementation guidance. These malformations are typically based
around loose interpretations or implementations of specifications
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 3]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
such as Internet Message Format [MAIL] and Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions [MIME].
1.2. Not The Purpose Of This Work
It is important to understand that this work is not an effort to
endorse or standardize certain common malformations. The code and
culture that introduces such messages into the mail stream needs to
be repaired, as the security penalty now being paid for this lax
processing arguably outweighs the reduction in support costs to end
users who are not expected to understand the standards. However, the
reality is that this will not be fixed quickly.
Given this, it is beneficial to provide implementers with guidance
about the safest or most effective way to handle malformed messages
when they arrive, taking into consideration the tradeoffs of the
choices available especially with respect to how various actors in
the email ecosystem respond to such messages in terms of handling,
parsing, or rendering to end users.
1.3. General Considerations
Many deviations from message format standards are considered by some
receivers to be strong indications that the message is undesirable,
such as spam or something containing malware. These receivers
quickly decide that the best handling choice is simply to reject or
discard the message. This means malformations caused by innocent
misunderstandings or ignorance of proper syntax can cause messages
with no ill intent also to fail to be delivered.
Senders that want to ensure message delivery are best advised to
adhere strictly to the relevant standards (including, but not limited
to, [MAIL], [MIME], and [DKIM]), as well as observe other industry
best practices such as may be published from time to time either by
the IETF or independently.
Receivers that haven't the luxury of strict enforcement of the
standards on inbound messages are usually best served by observing
the following guidelines for handling of malformed messages:
1. Whenever possible, mitigation of syntactic malformations should
be guided by an assessment of the most likely semantic intent.
For example, it is reasonable to conclude that multiple sets of
angle brackets around an address are simply superflous and can be
dropped.
2. When the intent is unclear, or when it is clear but also
impractical to change the content to reflect that intent,
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 4]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
mitigation should be limited to cases where not taking any
corrective action would clearly lead to a worse outcome.
3. Security issues, when present, need to be addressed and may force
mitigation strategies that are otherwise suboptimal.
2. Document Conventions2.1. Examples
Examples of message content include a number within braces at the end
of each line. These are line numbers for use in subsequent
discussion, and are not actually part of the message content
presented in the example.
Blank lines are not numbered in the examples.
3. Background
The reader would benefit from reading [EMAIL-ARCH] for some general
background about the overall email architecture. Of particular
interest is the Internet Message Format, detailed in [MAIL].
Throughout this document, the use of the term "message" should be
assumed to mean a block of text conforming to the Internet Message
Format.
4. Invariant Content
An agent handling a message could use several distinct
representations of the message. One is an internal representation,
such as separate blocks of storage for the header and body, some
header or body alterations, or tables indexed by header name, set up
to make particular kinds of processing easier. The other is the
representation passed along to the next agent in the handling chain.
This might be identical to the message input to the module, or it
might have some changes such as added or reordered header fields or
body elisions to remove malicious content.
Message handling is usually most effective when each in a sequence of
handling modules receives the same content for analysis. A module
that "fixes" or otherwise alters the content passed to later modules
can prevent the later modules from identifing malicious or other
content that exposes the end user to harm. It is important that all
processing modules can make consistent assertions about the content.
Modules that operate sequentially sometimes add private header fields
to relay information downstream for later filters to use (and
possibly remove), or they may have out-of-band ways of doing so.
However, even the presence of private header fields can impact a
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 5]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
downstream handling agent unaware of its local semantics, so an out-
of-band method is always preferable.
The above is less of a concern when multiple analysis modules are
operated in parallel, independent of one another.
Often, abuse reporting systems can act effectively only when a
complaint or report contains the original message exactly as it was
generated. Messages that have been altered by handling modules might
render a complaint inactionable as the system receiving the report
may be unable to identify the original message as one of its own.
Some message changes alter syntax without changing semantics. For
example, Section 7.4 describes a situation where an agent removes
additional header whitespace. This is a syntax change without a
change in semantics, though some systems (such as DKIM) are sensitive
to such changes. Message system developers need to be aware of the
downstream impact of making either kind of change.
Where a change to content between modules is unavoidable, adding
trace data (such as prepending a standard Received field) will at
least allow tracing of the handling by modules that actually see
different input.
There will always be local handling exceptions, but these guidelines
should be useful for developing integrated message processing
environments.
In most cases, this document only discusses techniques used on
internal representations. It is occasionally necessary to make
changes between the input and output versions; such cases will be
called out explicitly.
5. Mail Submission Agents
Within the email context, the single most influential component that
can reduce the presence of malformed items in the email system is the
Mail Handling Service (MHS; see [EMAIL-ARCH]), which includes the
Mail Submission Agent (MSA). This is the component that is
essentially the interface between end users that create content and
the mail stream.
MHSes need to become more strict about enforcement of all relevant
email standards, especially [MAIL] and the [MIME] family of
documents.
More strict conformance by relaying Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) will
also be helpful. although preventing the dissemination of malformed
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 6]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
messages is desirable, the rejection of such mail already in transit
also has a support cost, namely the creation of a [DSN] that many end
users might not understand.
6. Line Termination
For interoperable Internet Mail messages, the only valid line
separation sequence during a typical SMTP session is ASCII 0x0D
("carriage return", or CR) followed by ASCII 0x0A ("line feed", or
LF), commonly referred to as CRLF. This is not the case for binary
mode SMTP (see [BINARYSMTP]).
Common UNIX user tools, however, typically only use LF for internal
line termination. This means that a protocol engine that converts
between UNIX and Internet Mail formats has to convert between these
two end-of-line representations before transmitting a message or
after receiving it.
Non-compliant implementations can create messages with a mix of line
terminations, such as LF everywhere except CRLF only at the end of
the message. According to [SMTP] and [MAIL], this means the entire
message actually exists on a single line.
Within modern Internet Mail it is highly unlikely that an isolated CR
or LF is valid in common ASCII text. Furthermore, when content
actually does need to contain such an unusual character sequence,
[MIME] provides mechanisms for encoding that content in an SMTP-safe
manner.
Thus, it will typically be safe and helpful to treat an isolated CR
or LF as equivalent to a CRLF when parsing a message.
Note that this advice pertains only to the raw SMTP data, and not to
decoded MIME entities. As noted above, when MIME encoding mechanisms
are used, the unusual character sequences are not visible in the raw
SMTP stream.
7. Header Anomalies
This section covers common syntactic and semantic anomalies found in
a message header, and presents suggested mitigations.
7.1. Converting Obsolete and Invalid Syntaxes
A message using an obsolete header syntax (see Section 4 of [MAIL])
might confound an agent that is attempting to be robust in its
handling of syntax variations. A bad actor could exploit such a
weakness in order to get abusive or malicious content through a
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 7]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
filter. This section presents some examples of such variations.
Messages including them ought be rejected; where this is not
possible, recommended internal interpretations are provided.
7.1.1. Host-Address Syntax
The following obsolete syntax attempts to specify source routing:
To: <@example.net:fran@example.com>
This means "send to fran@example.com via the mail service at
example.net". It can safely be interpreted as:
To: <fran@example.com>
7.1.2. Excessive Angle Brackets
The following over-use of angle brackets:
To: <<<user2@example.org>>>
can safely be interpreted as:
To: <user2@example.org>
7.1.3. Unbalanced Angle Brackets
The following use of unbalanced angle brackets:
To: <another@example.net
can usually be treated as:
To: <another@example.net>
The following:
To: second@example.org>
can usually be treated as:
To: second@example.org
7.1.4. Unbalanced Parentheses
The following use of unbalanced parentheses:
To: (Testing <fran@example.com>
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 8]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
can safely be interpreted as:
To: (Testing) <fran@example.com>
Likewise, this case:
To: Testing) <sam@example.com>
can safely be interpreted as:
To: "Testing)" <sam@example.com>
In both cases, it is obvious where the active email address in the
string can be found. The former case retains the active email
address in the string by completing what appears to be intended as a
comment; the intent in the latter case is less obvious, so the
leading string is interpreted as a display name.
7.1.5. Commas in Address Lists
This use of an errant comma:
To: <third@example.net, fourth@example.net>
can usually be interpreted as ending an address, so the above is
usually best interpreted as:
To: third@example.net, fourth@example.net
7.1.6. Unbalanced Quotes
The following use of unbalanced quotation marks:
To: "Joe <joe@example.com>
leaves software with no obvious "good" interpretation. If it is
essential to extract an address from the above, one possible
interpretation is:
To: "Joe <joe@example.com>"@example.net
where "example.net" is the domain name or host name of the handling
agent making the interpretation. Another possible interpretation,
much simpler and likely more correct, is simply:
To: "Joe" <joe@example.com>
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 9]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 20137.1.7. Naked Local-Parts
[MAIL] defines a local-part as the user portion of an email address,
and the display-name as the "user-friendly" label that accompanies
the address specification.
Some broken submission agents might introduce messages with only a
local-part or only a display-name and no properly formed address.
For example:
To: Joe
A submission agent ought to reject this or, at a minimum, append "@"
followed by its own host name or some other valid name likely to
enable a reply to be delivered to the correct mailbox. Where this is
not done, an agent receiving such a message will probably be
successful by synthesizing a valid header field for evaluation using
the techniques described in Section 7.5.2.
7.2. Non-Header Lines
Some messages contain a line of text in the header that is not a
valid message header field of any kind. For example:
From: user@example.com {1}
To: userpal@example.net {2}
Subject: This is your reminder {3}
about the football game tonight {4}
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:53:35 -0400 {5}
Don't forget to meet us for the tailgate party! {7}
The cause of this is typically a bug in a message generator of some
kind. Line {4} was intended to be a continuation of line {3}; it
should have been indented by whitespace as set out in Section 2.2.3
of [MAIL].
This anomaly has varying impacts on processing software, depending on
the implementation:
1. some agents choose to separate the header of the message from the
body only at the first empty line (that is, a CRLF immediately
followed by another CRLF);
2. some agents assume this anomaly should be interpreted to mean the
body starts at line {4}, as the end of the header is assumed by
encountering something that is not a valid header field or folded
portion thereof;
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 10]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
3. some agents assume this should be interpreted as an intended
header folding as described above and thus simply append a single
space character (ASCII 0x20) and the content of line {4} to that
of line {3};
4. some agents reject this outright as line {4} is neither a valid
header field nor a folded continuation of a header field prior to
an empty line.
This can be exploited if it is known that one message handling agent
will take one action while the next agent in the handling chain will
take another. Consider, for example, a message filter that searches
message headers for properties indicative of abusive of malicious
content that is attached to a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) implementing
option 2 above. An attacker could craft a message that includes this
malformation at a position above the property of interest, knowing
the MTA will not consider that content part of the header, and thus
the MTA will not feed it to the filter, thus avoiding detection.
Meanwhile, the Mail User Agent (MUA) which presents the content to an
end user, implements option 1 or 3, which has some undesirable
effect.
It should be noted that a few implementations choose option 4 above
since any reputable message generation program will get header
folding right, and thus anything so blatant as this malformation is
likely an error caused by a malefactor.
The preferred implementation if option 4 above is not employed is to
apply the following heuristic when this malformation is detected:
1. Search forward for an empty line. If one is found, then apply
option 3 above to the anomalous line, and continue.
2. Search forward for another line that appears to be a new header
field (a name followed by a colon). If one is found, then apply
option 3 above to the anomalous line, and continue.
7.3. Unusual Spacing
The following message is valid per [MAIL]:
From: user@example.com {1}
To: userpal@example.net {2}
Subject: This is your reminder {3}
{4}
about the football game tonight {5}
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:53:35 -0400 {6}
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 11]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
Don't forget to meet us for the tailgate party! {8}
Line {4} contains a single whitespace. The intended result is that
lines {3}, {4}, and {5} comprise a single continued header field.
However, some agents are aggressive at stripping trailing whitespace,
which will cause line {4} to be treated as an empty line, and thus
the separator line between header and body. This can affect header-
specific processing algorithms as described in the previous section.
This example was legal in earlier versions of the Internet Mail
format standard, but was rendered obsolete as of [RFC2822] as line
{4} could be interpreted as the separator between the header and
body.
The best handling of this example is for a message parsing engine to
behave as if line {4} was not present in the message and for a
message creation engine to emit the message with line {4} removed.
7.4. Header Malformations
Among the many possible malformations, a common one is insertion of
whitespace at unusual locations, such as:
From: user@example.com {1}
To: userpal@example.net {2}
Subject: This is your reminder {3}
MIME-Version : 1.0 {4}
Content-Type: text/plain {5}
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:53:35 -0400 {6}
Don't forget to meet us for the tailgate party! {8}
Note the addition of whitespace in line {4} after the header field
name but before the colon that separates the name from the value.
The obsolete grammar of Section 4 of [MAIL] permits that extra
whitespace, so it cannot be considered invalid. However, a consensus
of implementations prefers to remove that whitespace. There is no
perceived change to the semantics of the header field being altered
as the whitespace is itself semantically meaningless. Therefore, it
is best to remove all whitespace after the field name but before the
colon and to emit the field in this modified form.
7.5. Header Field Counts
Section 3.6 of [MAIL] prescribes specific header field counts for a
valid message. Few agents actually enforce these in the sense that a
message whose header contents exceed one or more limits set there are
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 12]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
generally allowed to pass; they typically add any required fields
that are missing, however.
Also, few agents that use messages as input, including Mail User
Agents (MUAs) that actually display messages to users, verify that
the input is valid before proceeding. Some popular open source
filtering programs and some popular Mailing List Management (MLM)
packages select either the first or last instance of a particular
field name, such as From, to decide who sent a message. Absent
strict enforcement of [MAIL], an attacker can craft a message with
multiple instances of the same field fields if that attacker knows
the filter will make a decision based on one but the user will be
shown the others.
This situation is exacerbated when message validity is assessed, such
as through enhanced authentication methods like DomainKeys Identified
Mail [DKIM]. Such methods might cover one instance of a constrained
field but not another, taking the wrong one as "good" or "safe". An
MUA, for example could show the first of two From fields to an end
user as "good" or "safe" while an authentication method actually only
verified the second.
In attempting to counter this exposure, one of the following
strategies can be used:
1. reject outright or refuse to process further any input message
that does not conform to Section 3.6 of [MAIL];
2. remove or, in the case of an MUA, refuse to render any instances
of a header field whose presence exceeds a limit prescribed in
Section 3.6 of [MAIL] when generating its output;
3. where a field has a limited instance count, combine additional
instances into a single instance carrying the same inforamtion as
the multiple instances;
4. where a field can contain multiple distinct values (such as From)
or is free-form text (such as Subject), combine them into a
semantically identical single header field of the same name (see
Section 7.5.1);
5. alter the name of any header field whose presence exceeds a limit
prescribed in Section 3.6 of [MAIL] when generating its output so
that later agents can produce a consistent result. Any
alteration likely to cause the field to be ignored by downstream
agents is acceptable. A common approach is to prefix the field
names with a string such as "BAD-".
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 13]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
Selecting a mitigation action from the above list, or some other
action, must consider the needs of the operator making the decision,
and the nature of its user base.
7.5.1. Repeated Header Fields
There are some occasions where repeated fields are encountered where
only one is expected. Two examples are presented. First:
From: reminders@example.com {1}
To: jqpublic@example.com {2}
Subject: Automatic Meeting Reminder {3}
Subject: 4pm Today -- Staff Meeting {4}
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:00:00 -0700 {5}
Reminder of the staff meeting today in the small {6}
auditorium. Come early! {7}
The message above has two Subject fields, which is in violation of
Section 3.6 of [MAIL]. A safe interpretation of this would be to
treat it as though the two Subject field values were concatenated, so
long as they are not identical, such as:
From: reminders@example.com {1}
To: jqpublic@example.com {2}
Subject: Automatic Meeting Reminder {3}
4pm Today -- Staff Meeting {4}
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:00:00 -0700 {5}
Reminder of the staff meeting today in the small {6}
auditorium. Come early! {7}
Second:
From: president@example.com {1}
From: vice-president@example.com {2}
To: jqpublic@example.com {3}
Subject: A note from the E-Team {4}
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:00:00 -0700 {5}
This memo is to remind you of the corporate dress {6}
code. Attached you will find an updated copy of {7}
the policy. {8}
...
As with the first example, there is a violation in terms of the
number of instances of the From field. A likely safe interpretation
would be to combine these into a comma-separated address list in a
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 14]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
single From field:
From: president@example.com, {1}
vice-president@example.com {2}
To: jqpublic@example.com {3}
Subject: A note from the E-Team {4}
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:00:00 -0700 {5}
This memo is to remind you of the corporate dress {6}
code. Attached you will find an updated copy of {7}
the policy. {8}
...
7.5.2. Missing Header Fields
Similar to the previous section, there are messages seen in the wild
that lack certain required header fields. In particular, [MAIL]
requires that a From and Date field be present in all messages.
When presented with a message lacking these fields, the MTA might
perform one of the following:
1. Make no changes
2. Add an instance of the missing field(s) using synthesized content
based on data provided in other parts of the protocol
Option 2 is recommended for handling this case. Handling agents
should add these for internal handling if they are missing, but
should not add them to the external representation. The reason for
this advice is that there are some filter modules that would consider
the absence of such fields to be a condition warranting special
treatment (for example, rejection), and thus the effectiveness of
such modules would be stymied by an upstream filter adding them in a
way visible to other components.
The synthesized fields should contain a best guess as to what should
have been there; for From, the SMTP MAIL command's address can be
used (if not null) or a placeholder address followed by an address
literal (for example, unknown@[192.0.2.1]); for Date, a date
extracted from a Received field is a reasonable choice.
One other important case to consider is a missing Message-Id field.
An MTA that encounters a message missing this field should synthesize
a valid one and add it to the external representation, since many
deployed tools use the content of that field as a common unique
message reference, so its absence inhibits correlation of message
processing. Section 3.6.4 of [MAIL] describes advisable practise for
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 15]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
synthesizing the content of this field when it is absent, and
establishes a requirement that it be globally unique.
7.5.3. Return-Path
A valid message will have exactly one Return-Path header field, as
per Section 4.4 of [SMTP]. Should a message be encountered bearing
more than one, all but the topmost one is to be disregarded, as it is
most likely to have been added nearest to the mailbox that received
that message.
7.6. Missing or Incorrect Charset Information
MIME provides the means to include textual material employing
character sets ("charsets") other than US-ASCII. Such material is
required to have an identified charset. Charset identification is
done using a "charset" parameter in the Content-Type header field, a
charset label within the MIME entity itself, or the charset can be
implicitly specified by the Content-Type (see [CHARSET]).
It is unfortunately fairly common for required character set
information to be missing or incorrect in textual MIME entities. As
such, processing agents should perform basic sanity checks, such as:
o US-ASCII contains bytes between 1 and 127 inclusive only
(colloquially, "7-bit" data), so material including bytes outside
of that range ("8-bit" data) is necessarily not US-ASCII. (See
Section 2.3.1 of [MAIL].)
o [UTF-8] has a very specific syntactic structure that other 8-bit
charsets are unlikely to follow.
o Null bytes (ASCII 0x00) are not allowed in either 7-bit or 8-bit
data.
o Not all 7-bit material is US-ASCII. The presence of the various
escape sequences used for character switching can be used as an
indication of the various charsets based on ISO/IEC 2022, such as
those defined in [ISO-2022-CN], [ISO-2022-JP], and [ISO-2022-KR].
When a character set error is detected, processing agents should:
a. apply heuristics to determine the most likely character set and,
if successful, proceed using that information; or
b. refuse to process the malformed MIME entity.
A null byte inside a textual MIME entity can cause typical string
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 16]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
processing functions to mis-identify the end of a string, which can
be exploited to hide malicious content from analysis processes.
Accordingly, null bytes require additional special handling.
A few null bytes in isolation is likely to be the result of poor
message construction practices. Such nulls should be silently
dropped.
Large numbers of null bytes are usually the result of binary material
that is improperly encoded, improperly labeled, or both. Such
material is likely to be damaged beyond the hope of recovery, so the
best course of action is to refuse to process it.
Finally, the presence of null bytes may be used as indication of
possible malicious intent.
7.7. Eight-Bit Data
Standards-compliant email messages do not contain any non-ASCII data
without indicating that such content is present by means of published
SMTP extensions. Absent that, MIME encodings are typically used to
convert non-ASCII data to ASCII in a way that can be reversed by
other handling agents or end users.
The best way to handle non-compliant 8bit material depends on its
location.
Non-compliant 8bit material in MIME entity content should simply be
processed as if the necessary SMTP extensions had been used to
transfer the message. Note that improperly labeled 8bit material in
textual MIME entities may require treatment as described in
Section 7.6.
Non-compliant 8bit material in message or MIME entity header fields
can be handled as follows:
o Occurrences in unstructured text fields, comments, and phrases,
can be converted into encoded-words (see [MIME3] if a likely
character set can be determined). Alternatively, 8bit characters
can be removed or replaced with some other character.
o Occurrences in header fields whose syntax is unknown may be
handled by dropping the field entirely or by removing/replacing
the 8bit character as described above.
o Occurrences in addresses are especially problematic. Agents
supporting [EAI] may, if the 8bit material conforms to 8bit
syntax, elect to treat the message as an EAI message and process
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 17]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 2013
it accordingly. Otherwise, it is in most cases best to exclude
the address from any sort of processing -- which may mean dropping
it entirely -- since any attempt to fix it definitively is
unlikely to be successful.
8. MIME Anomalies
The five-part set of MIME specifications includes a mechanism of
message extensions for providing text in character sets other than
ASCII, non-text attachments to messages, multi-part message bodies,
and similar facilities.
Some anomalies with MIME-compliant generation are also common. This
section discusses some of those and presents preferred mitigations.
8.1. Missing MIME-Version Field
Any message that uses [MIME] constructs is required to have a MIME-
Version header field. Without it, the Content-Type and associated
fields have no semantic meaning.
It is often observed that a message has complete MIME structure, yet
lacks this header field. It is prudent to disregard this absence and
conduct analysis of the message as if it were present, especially by
agents attempting to identify malicious material.
Further, the absence of MIME-Version might be an indication of
malicious intent, and extra scrutiny of the message may be warranted.
Such omissions are not expected from compliant message generators.
8.2. Faulty Encodings
There have been a few different specifications of base64 in the past.
The implementation defined in [MIME] instructs decoders to discard
characters that are not part of the base64 alphabet. Other
implementations consider an encoded body containing such characters
to be completely invalid. Very early specifications of base64 (see
[PEM], for example) allowed email-style comments within base64-
encoded data.
The attack vector here involves constructing a base64 body whose
meaning varies given different possible decodings. If a security
analysis module wishes to be thorough, it should consider scanning
the possible outputs of the known decoding dialects in an attempt to
anticipate how the MUA will interpret the data.
Kucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 18]

Internet-Draft Safe Mail Handling November 20139. Body Anomalies9.1. Oversized Lines
A message containing a line of content that exceeds 998 characters
plus the line terminator (1000 total) violates Section 2.1.1 of
[MAIL]. Some handling agents may not look at content in a single
line past the first 998 bytes, providing bad actors an opportunity to
hide malicious content.
There is no specified way to handle such messages, other than to
observe that they are non-compliant and reject them, or rewrite the
oversized line such that the message is compliant.
To ensure long lines do not prevent analysis of potentially malicious
data, handling agents are strongly encouraged to take one of the
following actions:
1. Break such lines into multiple lines at a position that does not
change the semantics of the text being thus altered. For
example, breaking an oversized line such that a [URI] then spans
two lines could inhibit the proper identification of that URI.
2. Rewrite the MIME part (or the entire message if not MIME) that
contains the excessively long line using a content encoding that
breaks the line in the transmission but would still result in the
line being intact on decoding for presentation to the user. Both
of the encodings declared in [MIME] can accomplish this.
10. Security Considerations
The discussions of the anomalies above and their prescribed solutions
are themselves security considerations. The practises enumerated in
this document are generally perceived as attempts to resolve security
considerations that already exist rather than introducing new ones.
However, some of the attacks described here may not have appeared in
previous email specifications.
11. IANA Considerations
This document contains no actions for IANA.
[RFC Editor: Please remove this section prior to publication.]
12. ReferencesKucherawy, et al. Expires May 26, 2014 [Page 19]